As you may have heard ... John Derbyshire is out at National Review for committing an offending act opinion writing at Taki's Magazine.

I am not preparing to embark on a dissection and division of the piece into points I might admire or points I might disagree with as a means of determining whether John Derbyshire is fit to be associated with National Review and there's a reason. Parsing the piece in such a way reminds me of what ideological commissars do, what Thought Police do. Indeed, in the hot-frothing wake of the serial, overlapping, looping and repeating two-minute hates against the accomplished writer that went viral recently, this very exercise was conducted time and time again by an army of such commissars, from established media to small blogs. It was done time and again, not to engage with or even refute the arguments Derbyshire set down with frankness and cogent purpose, but to pass judgment on whether he as a lifelong contributor to public discourse should be banished from what passes for polite journalistic company. It was an odious exercise.

In the end, Derbyshire's point of view was not debated, but he as a human being was found guilty for the crime of debating. He broached a subject too far -- race -- and he revealed too much of himself in the process: his natural fears for his children's safety and well-being; his logical strategies to ensure their safety; his own undeterred reliance on his faculties of logic; and an extremely unusual candor and even consciousness about all of the above, not to mention his personal failings in the Good Samaritan and sycophant departments.

The feeding frenzy is over for now; the pool is quiet. But more than ever, the water is sterile.